


the fruit of knowledge, or, an apology for the witch

by helleborehound



Series: witches' words [3]
Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Kinder- und Hausmärchen | Grimm's Fairy Tales
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fractured Fairy Tale, Gen, POV Female Character, Snow White - Freeform, briar rose - Freeform, diamonds and toads, rapunzel - Freeform, the handless maiden
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-14
Updated: 2014-10-14
Packaged: 2018-02-21 04:11:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2454287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helleborehound/pseuds/helleborehound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If I had known what I know now, I would never have gone to draw water from the well in the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the fruit of knowledge, or, an apology for the witch

If I had known what I know now, I would never have gone to draw water from the well in the woods.

It was an old well, with poor water: hard as nails, and tainted with lime, such that it left a whitish dust wherever it dried. All the same, poor water was better than none. The relentless summer had reduced our brook to mud and withered the wheat in the fields. Our chickens were no longer laying, and I had given up my vegetable garden for dead. I went to the well in the last and desperate hope of saving our apple-tree.

Hunger made me careless. I passed, heedless, through a stand of dying rowan trees. I overlooked the oak leaves and acorns underfoot. I took no note of the lily-of-the-valley blooming alongside the path, or the deadly dapperling growing in its shade.

The well lacked a windlass, and my hands were clumsy as I pulled the bucket from the stone of its lip, spilling a little of the water upon the ground. When I turned, there was a crone standing before me, though I would swear that the path had been empty, and that I had passed no-one along the way.

I had learned the old tales well. When the crone pleaded thirst, I offered her water with all the courtesy due my elders. She asked me to find the comb she had dropped, and I did not refuse. She bade me braid her hair, and I did as I was bid.

Had I the slightest inkling of that which lay ahead, I would have turned my back on all the wisdom with which I had been raised, and borne my punishment of toads and frogs with grace. After all, what good would pearls and rubies do, when we could not afford the journey to a city where we might sell them? We could have eaten the frogs, at the very least.

The crone did not read by the book, however, and I did not receive repayment in jewels or gold. She told me, instead, that all green and growing things would flourish beneath my hand. That I would be able to heal all wounds with my touch. And finally, that in dreaming, I would be able to foretell futures.

In stories, those who receive great gifts and prophecies accept them with joy, full in the knowledge of their blessings. Mine was not such a state of grace. I returned home wondering if I had not suffered heat-stroke, if the crone at the well had been nothing more than a fever-dream. Had I truly understood that which had been granted to me, I would have continued on, deeper into the forest, and let my mother and father believe me lost. Had I known, I might have plunged into the well, and waited for the water to claim me.

When I returned to our cottage, I made my way behind the cottage and laid my hands upon the trunk of the apple-tree. It shivered – as I shivered – and right before my eyes, it sprouted forth new leaves, blossom, and budding fruit. The briefest of touches set my garden to rights: the runner beans restored, the raspberry canes revived, the lettuces fresh and new.

My mother and father were grateful, too glad for respite, for salvation, to question our reversal in fortune. We did not starve. Far from it. My lettuces leafed so rapidly, it was all I could do to cut them before they bolted. The strawberries were fat with fruit, and put forth runners like weeds. I picked the raspberry canes each morning, and by dusk they were once again filled.

We had more than we needed for our own use, and soon, the village came to us for barter. At first, hunger stayed all curiosity, but as summer passed, and the autumn skies filled with thunderclouds, the whispering began. My garden did more than flourish; it no longer grew ordinary plants. My horehound would not only soothe a sore throat, but could cure a cough – even one that had progressed to bloody spittle. My carrots let those who ate them see in the dark, as clearly and as keenly as cats might. The milk from my poppies could put a grown man into the deepest sleep for a week, and I grew pumpkins that, if left unchecked, could swell to the size of carriages.

Perhaps the whispers could have remained only whispers had the plants been my only uncanny gift. Perhaps I could have torn up the rosemary bushes that brought back lost memories to those who wore its sprigs, or uprooted the rue that, when added to the stewpot, eased the eater’s regrets. But the crone had spoken to me of two other gifts, and they waited to lay their claim upon me.

The night before the harvest festival, I dreamed that the miller’s horse had spooked while in harness. I dreamed of the butcher’s youngest son, crushed beneath the cart wheels. I woke trembling in fear. The crone had not told me if my dreams were of a certain future, or only futures that might come to pass.

I set out for the harvest feast with a sack of apples as my offering. The apple-tree had once grown only green apples – sparse, puckery, fruit, better suited to hard cider than eating – but after my excursion to the well, the new crop had come in full and fat and scarlet.

The green had been set with trestle tables, and the villagers were passing cakes and ale. A bonfire crackled merrily, filling the air with sweet woodsmoke. I could not see the miller’s horse and cart, and began to believe that my dream had been nothing more than a night terror. Instead, I smiled to see the butcher’s son take one of my apples, eagerly biting into its glossy skin.

The cobbler had brought his fiddle, and laid on a merry tune. I watched the youths of the village as they rose from the tables, seeking out the village maidens for dance partners. I waited. I held a small and fluttering hope that the farmer’s son who had danced so freely with me at the last harvest festival might approach me again.

A clatter and a shout pierced the sounds of revelry. Too late I saw the miller’s horse still in harness, trotting furiously with the cart rattling and jolting behind. Too late, I saw the butcher’s son astride the horse’s bare back, the reins slipping through his fingers. Too late, I saw him tumble from the horse, and fall beneath the wheels of the cart.

Screams rent the air. A group of men ran to the cart, lifting it away from the body. The butcher’s son lay limp as a ragdoll in the dirt of the road. His arms and legs were twisted at an unnatural angle at both wrist and knee. Gleaming shards of bone protruded from his ribcage, and blood trickled from a corner of his mouth. The villagers fell silent, save for one lone wailing voice that must have belonged to the boy’s mother. In the hush, I could hear the child gasping for breath.

My feet were not my own as I moved through the crowd, which stood as still as stone. I knelt before the boy, and, in the gentlest tones I could muster, I asked him why he had tried to ride the miller’s horse. In a broken whisper, he told me that he had heard a voice in his ear when he ate the apple, telling him to make a wish. His wish: to ride a horse like the king.

The king, who had been unseated from his horse during a joust, and been crushed beneath the hooves of his challenger’s steed.

I laid my hands upon his chest. Before my eyes, his broken bones mended, his torn flesh smoothed over and became pink and whole. His pale cheeks turned rosy, and he sat up, crying of hunger, and asking for his mother. When I stepped away from the butcher’s son, the villagers, moving as one, stepped away from me. In that moment, I knew that the girl that I had been was no more. The gifts had claimed me, shaped my role, and would now hand it to me as a dress already cut and sewn, ready for the wearing.

After the harvest festival, the villagers no longer came to barter, but sought only to deal in trade, paying me in silver and gold. Their words became sparse, their greetings fearful rather than warm. The farmer’s son – he who had danced with me and crowned my head with a wreath of flowering may the spring before – would no longer look me in the eye. I was heartbroken, yet unsurprised, when the banns were read for his marriage to the baker’s daughter.

Truth be told, I do not believe that the crone herself was a witch. Witches are still human, for all their wild and strange ways. Fae are colder, indifferent and implacable, prone to sowing strife for their own amusement.

My mother and father were uneasy in my presence, but quick to soothe their troubled minds with thoughts of silver and gold. For some, poverty comes as an undoing. For others, it is prosperity that wreaks havoc. It only takes a little greed to beget a greater one, and then another, greater still.

One afternoon in late autumn, not long after the raspberry canes had finally given up their relentless fruiting, I found my mother in the garden, apple core in hand and traces of skin in her teeth. Her eyes were lit by an eerie gleam. My father stood beside her with a strange, dull expression upon his face, and there was no recognition in his eyes when she told him to seize me. Though I thrashed and struggled, she took a rope and bound my wrists and ankles tight. She ordered my father to carry me to the woodpile, and set my bound wrists upon the chopping block. I screamed for all that I was worth, but it did not stop my mother from picking up the axe.

She knew what I had done, she said. She told me that I had marked myself as a tithe to the devil. She would offer up my hands and be richly rewarded for her sacrifice. I knew, then, that the light that gleamed in her eyes was the shine of gold by candlelight. This was what had come of a wish for greater wealth.

I begged her to listen. I begged my father to stop her, but he remained as mute and unyielding as a log in the woodpile. My mother raised the axe high, and brought it down with all the force that she could muster.

The axe glanced off my bound wrists as though it had struck iron. It flew out of my mother’s grasp and caught her in the throat. A great gout of blood spurted forth, and she fell back upon the grass, limp and unmoving. I reached for her, trying to touch her, but the knots in the rope held strong and firm. Try as I might, I could not break free.

Only when the blood gushing from my mother’s throat had died to a weak trickle did my father stir. He shook himself, as though shaking off the stupor from a long sleep, but his eyes were wide with bewilderment, not horror. Where am I, he asked. Who am I. And I guessed that he, too, must have eaten an apple – to wish away the strange magic that surrounded him.

I told him that he was a travelling woodsman, that he had unknowingly chosen to ask lodging at the home of a witch who had kept me prisoner. He had interrupted her when she had tried to make of me a sacrifice to the devil, saving my life. His memory had been injured as her magic recoiled upon her death.

The man who had been my father accepted my story as truth. He left the village with his travelling cloak upon his back, axe in hand. I could not say if his memory would recover. I preferred to hope that it would not.

That night, I built a pyre beneath the apple-tree for the body of the woman who had been my mother, and laid kindling and firewood in all the garden beds. I struck a spark, and set the fire ablaze, retreating to the brook as I waited for all to reduce to ashes and bare earth. I had made up my mind: once I had cleared all the traces of my garden, I would leave the village and seek out the nearest holy order. In the sanctity of a convent, strange gifts are not magic, but divine blessing. Perhaps there I could find some peace.

The trickling water of the brook lulled me into an uneasy slumber, and I awoke shortly before dawn. The plants in the garden beds were no more than charcoal and embers, but the apple-tree remained standing. A heavy, sweet scent to the air told me that the tree’s fruit had been consumed in the blaze, but there was nary a scorch-mark or wilted leaf to show that flames twice my height had leapt beneath its branches.

I came up to the tree in disbelief, and put my hand to its trunk. It shook beneath my palm, as though seized with laughter, and a shower of ripe, scarlet apples came tumbling down. I looked up, and saw that its boughs were once again weighed down with fruit. I heard a rustling, and looked to see that the plants in my garden beds were putting forth new shoots, becoming as lush and as vibrant as they had ever been, before my very eyes. My role had become a certainty. There would be no convent for me.

I tried twice more to destroy the apple-tree. I watered it with boiling lye. I sowed its roots with salt. Still it flourished. Its boughs remained thick with apples even as autumn turned to winter and the garden lay silent beneath a blanket of snow.

The villagers no longer came to me for trade. My days passed in solitude, interrupted only by unwary travelers and the truly desperate. I gave the former a meal and a bed with all the courtesy with which I had been raised, and offered what grace I could to the latter. Time and time again I tried to refuse payment, but those who sought me out insisted upon their tribute of silver or gold. My role, it seemed, would allow me no room for kindness.

One evening, shortly after a hard frost that had left the world glittering beneath a sheen of ice, there sounded a knock at my door. At the threshold stood a husband and wife whose horse had foundered upon the icy road. They had come to seek shelter for the night.

I welcomed them as I welcomed all travelers. I saw to their horse, too, whilst they made themselves comfortable by the fire. My gift did not distinguish between man and beast. If anything, healing a horse was the easier task, for beasts regarded me with neither awe nor fear.

The night passed like any other winter night. My guests would have passed unremarked, indistinguishable from the other travelers I had hosted in a similar fashion, had I not watched them go in the light of early morning – and caught sight of stark prints, cast by hobnailed boots, in the frosted earth leading behind the cottage. Splintered twigs and cracked ice told their story: the husband had stolen an apple from my tree.

The following night, I dreamed. I saw the husband and the wife returning home from a fruitless pilgrimage, their desperate yearning for a child still unfulfilled. I saw the husband offer the apple to his wife.

The woman ate the fruit. I dreamed that she wished for a daughter, a child with skin as white as its flesh, lips red as its skin, and hair black as its seed. She did not wish for kindness, or honesty, or even basic human decency. And so, when her wish was granted – well. The girl was fair, but her heart was as empty and as hollow as the chamber inside an apple.

I could have accepted my fate as Cassandra. The world spares little enough audience for the words of women, no matter how much truth they contain. But the crone, whether by design or omission, had not granted me the certainty of my visions. I could not say that the future was unyielding marble when it could also be impressionable clay. I would not watch a tragedy unfold and not do what I could to intervene.

Winter passed, and spring returned. I planted hedge of wicked briars and a trench of stinging nettles to shield my garden from curious visitors. I sowed the garden beds with nightshade, with henbane and mandrake. With hellebore, with foxglove and monkshood. For all I told myself that it served as both defense and a warning, I knew it for the empty gesture that it was: latching the barn door well after the horse had already bolted.

Next, I built an oven. Every night and every morning, I kindled the fire and cast a bushel of apples into its flames. The sweet scent of charred apples hung heavy in the air about the cottage, and no wind, however brisk, was enough to dispel it.

When summer returned, and the moon shone full and luminous, I set out upon the road with my traveling cloak about my shoulders. The time had come for me to reap the mischief that the husband and wife had sown.

I found the husband and the wife easily enough. I arrived upon their doorstep during the child’s christening, as I would and must. The story nigh demanded it. I made no threats or accusations: the mere sight of me was enough to leave both husband and wife pale and stammering. If they had not known me for what I was when they accepted my hospitality, they had certainly come by fresh knowledge during the intervening months.

The woman had already proved herself a fool, and I knew she would never see her daughter for what she was. Her husband was more sensible. Or fearful, though that is often another way of saying sensible. His petty theft served as a convenient excuse. Three days after I darkened their doorstep, they returned to mine. They left the child with me.

I knew little or nothing of child-rearing, but the child seemed content enough in her cradle. She did not wail for her mother – a fact for which I was most grateful – but neither did she laugh. I tried to sing to her, as I had once heard the shepherd’s wife singing to her newborn son, but the words caught in my throat. Instead, I spoke to her only when necessity demanded it, and the seasons passed in silence.

The girl outgrew her cradle, and moved from crawl to toddle. One fine afternoon, I found her in the garden, sprinkling caterpillars with salt and laughing to see them shrivel. I scolded her for her cruelty, and ordered her to bed without supper. She sobbed and wailed and swore to never do such a thing again, and I took her remorse for honesty. The next day, I found the grass scattered with butterflies’ wings, and her hands coated in their silvery dust. With a smile as innocent as it was heartless, she told me that she had not laid a finger upon the caterpillars – only the butterflies.

Despite all the cruelties, great and small, that had come with the crone’s gifts, I had yet to truly grasp the bounds of my role, its narrowness and its shallowness. I did not see the task I had taken upon myself as a futility. I was still young, and certain that I only needed to seek out the right path of all the myriad paths to make the child decent, if not good.

Oh, but how to find that path? The girl grew ever more sly and clever in her torments. She would startle the chickens in the coop and put them off their feed. She sang sweetly enough to lure songbirds to her hand, but she would pluck their bright feathers while they still lived. Our goat stopped giving milk and wasted away, and only after I buried the carcass did I find stems of monkshood and hellebore hiding in the feed-trough.

Years passed. The girl grew lovelier with every season – pale of skin, and dark of hair, with a mouth as red and as scarlet as the ripest apple. She knew it, too. She would look at herself in the small looking-glass that had once been my mother’s, and I shivered to see her eyes, dark and cold and calculating. I began to refuse the errant travelers who showed up at our door, too afraid of the mischief she might work.

I tried. I made enquiries at the convent; I woke in cold sweats from dreams in which she sowed strife and misery among the good sisters. I had been told that the miners of the far mountains sometimes took servants, but she had grown up too proud and defiant to do anyone’s bidding.

Instead, I let my garden spill beyond its borders, pushed until the road was filled with brambles and nigh-impassable. I taught the trees to grow until the forest swallowed the village. I planted more briars, and barred all the doors and windows with heavy bolts of iron. If I could not keep danger at bay, at least I could do what I could to keep the world out.

I forgot that to some men, a forbidden path is as good as an invitation.

The knight prince was a fool, a good-natured, sweet-hearted fool who had grown up believing in stories in which beauty equaled goodness. Stories in which witches were always evil, and fair maidens in need of rescuing. I cannot say what sort of twisted story brought him to the lost village and spurred him to hack at the brambles and briars until he reached my garden – the same sort of tale, I suppose, that transforms fur slippers into glass, and makes a climbing rope of a maiden’s hair.

When the prince entered the garden, he found the girl sitting in the apple-tree. When he spoke to her, she offered him an apple.

I had warned her from her earliest years that the tree bore deadly fruit, and that one bite was enough to kill both man and beast. On this point, and this point alone, she had not seen fit to question or taunt me. I believe she expected to watch him fall down dead. Imagine her delight when he wished for her to love him, only to see his wish turn awry, so that he desperately loved her.

I had not dreamed of the prince, and I failed to notice his comings and goings. The girl did as she pleased, and my days were filled with toil in both the garden and the cottage. When I finally surprised the two of them together, I cannot say if I was horrified, or resigned.

I didn’t push him out of the tree into a wicked hedge of briars; she did. She laughed to see him with blood running down his cheeks, his ruined eyes despairing. He begged me for death.

I dreamed that should I heal his torn skin, restore his sight, she would seek him out, and toy with him further, until she finally tired of him and left him to die. Even so, I did not kill him for mercy: I dreamed that if I delivered her child with the same knife I used to slit his throat, she would finally meet her end.

My gift ran true. She died in childbirth. Her twins I left with honest folk who had lost a child of their own.

I am still here. Every evening and every morning, I collect the apples and kindle the oven. Every evening and every morning, I reap all the sorrows that I unknowingly sowed the day I went to fetch water from the well in the woods.

When Hansel and Gretel are grown, they will come for me. This is my role: I have already dreamed it. 


End file.
